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And here’s why all your circuits should have some kind of reverse-polarity or over-voltage protection: I nearly killed Nibbler yesterday. I brought the hardware to a friend’s house for a nerdfest party, but when I demoed it, I accidentally plugged in the 9V AC power supply from Mozart’s Credit Card instead of the normal 5V DC supply. I’ve gotten lazy with my circuit designs, preferring to use an external regulated 5V supply instead of including power regulation on the board. Nibbler has no voltage regulator, rectifier, reverse-polarity protection, or fuse, so the 9V AC went straight to the power pins on all the chips. Baaaaaad!

Fortunately my mistake didn’t release the magic smoke from the chips. The speaker buzzed and the LCD showed some strange lines, and at first I thought a wire must have come loose during transport. It only took me about 10 seconds to recognize my error, and luckily Nibbler was fine after switching to the right power supply. If I’d left the 9V AC supply plugged in for longer, I think the board would have been toast.

Square Pegs in a Round Hole

Once Nibbler was up and running, we tried the Mastermind program that I wrote a few months back. It was a hilarious example of how six very smart guys can take fifteen minutes and a lot of arguing to solve a single Mastermind puzzle, but it also exposed some subtleties in the rules of Mastermind that I’d never considered before.

Most readers are probably familiar with the game: a codemaker chooses a four-element secret color code , and a codebreaker tries to guess it. After each guess, the codemaker gives feedback in the form of black or white pegs: a black peg means some element is the right color and in the right position, while a white peg means some element is the right color but in the wrong position. But what does that mean exactly, and what elements does it refer to?

Imagine you’re the codebreaker, and your guess is yellow-red-blue-green:

The codemaker comes back with three black pegs and one white peg:

Depending on your interpretation of the rules, you may think this is an invalid result, and the codemaker has made a mistake. After all, if three of the guesses are the right color in the right position, then there’s only one incorrect position remaining. The color guess at that position must either be correct (which would result in a black peg) or incorrect (which would result in no peg at all). Right? Wrong!

The critical question is whether the black and white pegs reflect the codebreaker’s guess with respect to the secret code, or the secret code with respect to the codebreaker’s guess. It might seem that it would be the same either way, but it’s not. Translated into pseudo-code, the two possible scoring algorithms are:

and with the yellow-red-blue-green guess shown earlier, then the secret-centric scoring algorithm will result in black-black-black-white, but the guess-centric algorithm will result in black-black-black.

I think most people play the game using the guess-centric scoring algorithm, without realizing it. It seems more natural, as the score pegs are a reflection of how closely the guess matches the secret code, not how closely the secret code matches the guess. But surprisingly, I can’t find any definitive answer to which algorithm is correct. The online descriptions of Mastermind rules that I’ve found are vague on this point, or contradictory. The Wikipedia description of the rules implies both of these scoring algorithms are wrong, but isn’t specific enough to define an alternate algorithm. This page sounds like the guess-centric algorithm in its text, but the provided example uses the secret-centric algorithm. Unfortunately the official Hasbro game rules for Mastermind to Go only gives one example, which is ambiguous as to which algorithm should be used. The Parker Brother game rules are also ambiguous, and don’t give any examples. But the published rules for Pressman Ultimate Mastermind (which uses five colors instead of four) uses the secret-centric algorithm.

So how can we know which algorithm is the right one? I’m not sure we can. Mastermind is just a modern version of an old pencil-and-paper game called Bulls and Cows, which may date back more than a century. I couldn’t find anything definitive about the origins of that game or the correct rules. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter which scoring algorithm is used, as long as both players agree on it. For Nibbler I chose the secret-centric algorithm. Even though it’s less intuitive to me, it seems to be the most common choice among those people who pay attention to this quirk in the game rules. What do you think?

2 Comments so far

Tom Davies December 18th, 2013
1:23 am

I haven’t played Mastermind for a long time, but my recollection of my interpretation of the rules was that I would give a black for each match, then exclude those positions and give a white for each remaining guess which matches any of the remaining secrets.